Is this the anti-MySpace that the self-referential meme-mire that is the int4rw3b had to generate in order to avoid an implosion?

electricsoma. It's Bobtastic ;)

If some members of the U.S. Chocolate Industry have their way, we will soon see a detrimental change in the quality of chocolate you love. Their proposal is to change the basic formula of chocolate in order to use vegetable fat substitutes in place of cocoa butter, and to use milk substitutes in the place of nutritionally superior milk.  These changes will have adverse effects on the eating, physical and nutritional quality of chocolate, and beg the question: What consumer benefit is associated with implementing these changes? The answer is none.

I like chocolate just the way it is. Made with 100% cocoa butter and real milk, not than some concocted blend of fats and other substitutes.

Without proper labeling, consumers will find it difficult and confusing to differentiate the current gold standard of real chocolate vs. this new concoction, which has substitute ingredients. This will amount to economic fraud to the consumer as the product will become cheaper with inferior ingredients.

The proposed formula contains large quantities of bad Trans fats, which are not good for your health.

Cocoa butter is unique; vegetable fats can only masquerade as cocoa butter.

The eating properties, flavor and mouth feel will all be different - they're messing with the user experience and pleasure.

All manufacturers, even those who do not want to support this, will be forced to convert to the new concoction due to the economic advantages associated with the new formula and their wanting to remain effectively competitive within the category. The net effect will be a total downgrade in the eating enjoyment and quality for chocolate.

When does it end? Sawdust and brown food color?

Come on, for the last several hundred years (if not longer) chocolate has been taken to have a particular minimum list of ingredients.

To allow something that's a bland artificial substitute simply to allow a few corportations to make an extra buck is just plain wrong.

Let them call it chocolike. or candy. or processed slurry - there are plenty of names for it, but leave chocolate alone. I know what it's doing to my body and accept the risks but this - it's playing Russian roulette with a nations sweet tooth

What next?

If this passes I shudder to think.

Act now before it's too late. Read more here, and sign the petition here. Do it now while you still know what's in that peanut butter cup....

In my quest to find better ways to debug and understand what's going on with various sites I've tried a lot of tools and techniques, but at the end of the day it's the simple ones you keep coming back to.

Fiddler is one of those really simple but powerful apps that fills a niche.

Want to know what's really going on when your browser talks to the server? Care about the headers, the cookies, every byte in the request, the number of connections - all of which are important when debugging and performance tuning.

Curious about what information your server is sharing without you knowing - vital when trying to lock a site down and not give crackers too much information that you don't have to share.

Fiddler makes that job a lot easier.

It's an HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

And it's developed by a Microsoft employee and supported as an unsupported PowerTool (ie - use it entirely at your own risk!)

After six years looking after the technology it was with some trepidation I waited for the BB07 site to go live.

It's always tough to walk away from a project that you've put so much sweat and sleepless nights into.

One of the hardest things for me was knowing that my content management system was going to be retired and it was going to move to a new software platform.

The worst thing for me was going to Bigbrother.3mobile.com.au and seeing this: 

Not only wasn't it working, it wasn't even using IIS any more!

When it did come back... it wouldn't let me in (maybe it knew who I was ... Big Brother is always watching after all!)

Reading reports on Behind Big Brother (BBBA) about problems with membership details and logins I had to wonder if they were missing me and my system - though the crew (you know who you are) probably were not missing my sense of humour and demands for chocolate to get anything done ;)

Luckily I was able to explain in the BBBA forums that credit card details were secure... heading off one crisis I hope. Even though the registration page wasn't showing a padlock the actual form was within a secured iframe. Not my preferred way of doing it (because the browser doesn't show the padlock and reassure the visitor) but still safe.

Talking to the folks back in Aus they're working through the teething problems and I think it's all going to come together pretty soon.... this is their first 24 hours live so they're probably learning a lot of hard lessons very fast!

Here's hoping BB07 becomes a season everyone talks about for the right reasons ;)

Update: Saw the nicest comment from a BBBA user today - after all the grief they've given me the last 6 years this made me smile (I've actually always been really glad of their passion and bug testing skills):

Sadly, even for a lot of chocolate, beer and coffee we'd probably not be able to get the old site up and running sooner than these guys will get the problem resolved... after all, I'm not even in the country any more

There's a world of User Generated Content (UGC) out there. From sites like youTube and MySpace through to Geni and Twitter.

More UGC in fact that I'll ever get to consume, even if the inclination was there.

It got me thinking the other day, what about all the responses to comments I've made on other peoples blogs or forums. Places I didn't think to subscribe to an RSS feed for the comments, or bother to opt-in for instant notifications of replies to my post, or even sites that didn't offer that. Those profiles on sites that took my fancy that only strangers look at now. Those orphans of the internet age

What happens to the Me Generated Content (MeGC)? In many cases for me it's long forgotten by us humans, but the computers know. They track it. They watch our every move.

Okay, so maybe they don't yet, but I imagine it's only a matter of time before there's some clever plug-in for IE or an add-on for Firefox that recognizes when you're posting in a forum or responding to a blog and let's you crawl those conversations at a later date.

For now however the best bet is the trusty search engine.

Live.com presents, in no particular order of relevance, my footprints on the Internet.

Okay, so it's not a particularly helpful tool in this format. I can't easily de-duplicate by site, or look at things chronologically, or intelligently find posts/responses specifically to things I've said... but it's a start. It does rely on the fact that over the last couple of years I've used a consistent nom de plume on the web, but with a bit more work and creative filtering I could extend that to previous personalities...

It would be cool to see an application that combines some intelligent searching and monitoring (with some semantic analysis so it understands forum threading models etc) coupled with use of trackbacks cross-references to browser activity to provide a clear MeGC picture of the world... a homepage that's all about you!

I'm always keen to know that the hardware I've got running at home is ticking along nicely. I do regular tune-ups of my PCs and basic error checking to at least give me a clue if there's trouble ahead.

Vista, with it's higher resource requirements than WinXP, is a good time to go through and do a thorough hardware inspection to make sure you don't upgrade and then run into problems.

That can be as simple as running the Vista upgrade wizard or it can be as hands-on and in-depth as opening machines up, blowing dust clear, re-seating the CPU, checking the bearings on the fans, checking the routings on internal cables etc.

It's harder to test some of the peripherals on your system though. For instance the router. Will it work with Vista? Will there be trouble? Does it support feature XYZ that Vista can use to improve reliability, throughput or security?

Sure, you can wade through the manufacturers support site and hope they have some decent (and intelligible) documentation (scattered with marketing double-speak of course) - and while you're there don't forget to check you have the latest firmware for your device.

Much easier to run the Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool and make sure that it actually does what it says on the box.

This procedure performs a number of basic tests on your router to see what capabilities are supported. Some functions (ironically) can only be tested from Vista, but it does give you a good outline and idea of what's working and what's not.

A while ago the RIAA asked to be awarded royalties from Internet Radio providers such as Pandora and Live365 that was totally disproportionate to their income and not in line with what traditional or satellite radio are being charged.

The first appeal against the ruling has failed.

This gouging is apparently intended to protect the artists, when in fact it looks like it will drive many of the US based Internet Radio providers to the wall. This is not good for anyone actually creating music.

The upshot is a lot of this artist revenue will either go away, or move offshore to less well regulated environments... and the only people who suffer will be the artists (I can't find it in my heart to care about the folks from the RIAA!)

Luckily you can help. There is a letter-writing campaign underway so you can let your Representatives know this is going on (email and fax work as well), and you can write to the media and spread the word on and off-line.

Let's not let short-sighted greed destroy a nascent industry that has the potential to reverse the record labels push to lowest common denominator mediocrity in mainstream music.

Reading about the RIAA and the latest DRM snafus, it makes you wonder why people are returning to DRM free vinyl...

Well, after an initial good start my iPhone had to go back. It was a good enough phone and most of the time was adequate. But the reliance on the PC was a real problem - if the machine went to sleep or someone else was playing a game then the phone became useless. I suspect a lot of the problems are down to the machine that was used as the host being a multi profile box so someone other than the skype user could be in control.

I did like the charging cradle and volume of the Linksys iPhone though, as well as the fact that managing quality of service (QoS) was as simple as with the standard Skype app.

So on to the next device. A Belkin Skype WiFi phone. This looks and feels like a slightly lighter version of the old Sony T610 and is totally self contained - unlike the iPhone there's no charging cradle (shame as you have to leave it tethered to the USB charger), and no USB dongle to connect back to the PC because it talks directly to your WiFi router.

The quality on this phone has been pretty good, but there are a number of issues - and I'm not sure if they're because we have a Linksys WRT54Gv6 router or if the phone itself just isn't that clever.

Initial setup is rather hard, and they really should include a wizard to help the process. For a start I use MAC filtering on my WiFi router and the only way to find the MAC address for the unit is to connect and then query the settings (Update: I did find it printed under the battery) but the process of entering my WPA2 network key and configuring it for a fixed IP address (so I could tweak QoS) is all a bit tricky on the keypad.

QoS setup was a pain. For some reason it refers to the port it's using as "Skype Port 1" - no indication of what real port it's using so setting up port forwarding or assigning QoS to a port is rather difficult. I picked the same port that Skype had been using on the PC and it seems to work - not sure if it helped though.

The big bug with this phone is that it sometimes falls of the WiFi network for no apparent reason, and then fails to reconnect properly (I've often touched a key to wake it up only to see it saying "Unable to connect to internet on XXXXX" - but clicking proceed and it re-establishes the connection just fine). It means missed calls and frustration in the house.

There are one or two other little niggles:

• The ring tone volume. It's too darn quiet. If the TV is on then forget about hearing it if it's in the kitchen. In-call the volume is okay though.
• I miss the cradle for charging (having to plug in stops it feeling like a "house" phone) - there are two metal bars along the bottom that look like they could be used for charging so maybe there's one in the works
• I'd also love a handsfree/speakerphone mode for those long conference calls.
• It would be nice if the firmware checked itself for the latest version as well as the Skype client version (a "latest version" check said it was up-to-date, but it was running old firmware)

Hopefully, thanks to the fine folks at CruchGear my next experiment in the world of Skype as a home-phone will be more positive. I just won a give-away that means I'll be trying out the SMC Skype phone (looks very similar to the Belkin unit) that comes with it's own FON router... hopefully a more reliable pairing... will know when the package arrives

It's easy to question the speed with which Microsoft has embraced the internet age - and many in the past have. But today that's no longer true (though the competition wishes it was)!

They're a significant player in almost every aspect of the evolution of the web as a platform, a service and a commodity and with announcements of technologies like Silverlight and beta Live services their stamp on the space is only going to continue to grow.

The opening of the new server farm in Quincy WA should firmly remind people that Microsoft are pretty serious about the cloud and their place in it. They've got the focus, the determination and the funding to build on a pretty fantastic scale.

I hope though that they think about following in the footsteps of Yahoo! and Google and going green with their power supply...

After lurking in the shadow of it's codename for several months Silverlight has finally been announced and folks are talking about it.

So, what is it?

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.

Since joining Microsoft most of what I've been doing has been related to Silverlight - learning it, talking to customers about it, and helping to prepare material for the NAB and MIX launches .... it's very exciting, and we've only seen the very beginnings of what's in store!